Tag Archives: buck kartalian

And so we reach the final episode of Monster Squad, and it’s pretty dire, even by this show’s low standards, although our son adored it and laughed all through the final fight. He claims this was his favorite episode of the series, but his mother and I don’t honestly believe that, on account of the most recent thing he’s watched is almost always his favorite thing.

I did like the way the villain/villainess forces Dracula and Bruce to surrender, by threatening to throw a puppy out a porthole. What a rotten man/woman! He/she is played by Vito Scotti, helping to prove a theory that Vito Scotti was in everything.

As we discussed earlier, NBC’s 1976 Saturday morning schedule was a total disaster and everything got canceled, so this would be the last appearance of these heroes. Fred Grandy almost immediately landed on his feet. He co-starred as Gopher in the Love Boat TV movie in the spring, and went on to appear regularly for nine years there before retiring from Hollywood to go into politics. Over the last couple of years, he’s had a recurring role in The Mindy Project.

Sadly, all three of the actors who played the monsters have died. Buck Kartalian, who was in his mid-fifties when they made this show, continued in small roles before retiring a decade ago. He passed away this spring at the age of 93. Henry Polic II was best known as a voice actor, taking on dozens of roles in all kinds of cartoons, and is perhaps best remembered as the Scarecrow in the celebrated Batman animated show. He died in 2013. Michael Lane played thugs, bodyguards, and henchmen for almost thirty years before retiring in the early nineties. He passed away last year.

Behind the camera, William P. D’Angelo, Ray Allen, and Harvey Bullock worked together as a production company for a few more years and their series The Red Hand Gang became a very fondly remembered hit in England, where it was repeated many times. I won’t claim my nostalgia for this show was really rewarded by it being very good, but more than half of the episodes had some pretty good jokes and it was fun to see some of the guest stars, and, most importantly of all, our son really loved it.

You can tell this episode of Monster Squad was made forty years ago. The villain complains that the price of oil is too high at sixty cents a gallon to boil our heroes in it. Instead, he locks them in one of those drowning tanks that villains on adventure TV shows have. Our son clutched his security blanket very tightly indeed tonight. He really loved the final fight, which had a bit more of the “imitable” body blows that I believe the censors did not like than in other episodes. Also, remembering what I said about silver bullets two episodes ago, this time out the villain claims to have a gun and plans to shoot Bruce, but a gun is not actually shown on screen.

The baddie is Lawrence of Moravia, who claims to be the fifth richest person in the world. (A used car salesman in Cleveland is the richest. Sounds like a joke from a Stanley Ralph Ross script to me.) I love how Frank politely refers to him as “Mr. Of Moravia.” He’s played by Joseph Mascolo, who had starred with Jack Palance in the bizarrely-named cop show Bronk the previous season and is best known for his work in soap operas. He’s a semi-regular performer on Days of Our Lives, playing the role of Stefano DiMera in over 1600 episodes over the last thirty-odd years.

I vividly remember “The Weatherman” from my childhood. In part that’s because the villain was on the Milton-Bradley board game – bottom center if I remember rightly – and in part because the episode taught me that Alaska was the largest of the states. In an insane and beautiful coincidence, this morning the episode also taught our son that very same fact. Like me forty years ago, he thought Texas was the biggest state. That’s what it looks like on most maps!

And this fact messed me up on a class project in school, not in kindergarten for the 1976 election, but four years later, when Reagan the elephant and Carter the donkey and Anderson the large letter I were trying to win states in an educational group game. I insisted beyond reason that whichever candidate my team was assigned absolutely had to win Alaska, because it was the largest state. And that’s how I learned how the electoral college works. Blasted Monster Squad.

And this fact is important today, because the plot of the episode concerns the Weatherman holding the entire nation to ransom by covering it in snow and ice on July 4th and demanding a special election to make him president. (He gets 126% in Illinois, I observe without comment.) As soon as I finish writing this silly thing, my son and I are in fact off to the polls to cast my vote. What a cute coincidence!

The Weatherman is played by the unmistakable Avery Schreiber, of course. I remember once about twenty years ago that Schreiber came up in conversation sometime and somehow and my best friend didn’t know who he was. Somebody mentioned he was Jack Burns’ partner and he didn’t know who Burns was, either. You know, fat guy, bushy moustache… he was the Weatherman in Monster Squad! How we managed without IMDB and Wikipedia on our phones.

Anyway, go vote, everybody! Let’s have 126% turnout this year! I read that a Trump voter in Iowa was arrested yesterday for voting twice in Des Moines, so we’re on the way!

Geoffrey Lewis, who we saw a couple of months ago in the final episode of Ark II, plays this week’s villain, the Skull. His plan is to revive the corpses of all of history’s greatest villains into an unstoppable, undead army. The only one he succeeds in reviving, however, is the mummy of, err, “King Toot.”

Our son got a little nervous twice tonight. Both Frank and Bruce are put in dangerous traps and things look a little bad for them. But the threat against Bruce is so silly that it was pretty instantly defused. Earlier, I had been a little surprised that the big fight was actually a little more… shall we say “real” than the previous, ridiculous ones with such silly and inoffensive weapons as balloons and invisible swords. The characters were actually throwing each other around. Then Bruce ends up in a grave and the Skull threatens to dispose of him with a silver bullet. That’s how you kill werewolves, remember, by shooting them with a bullet made of silver.

Except this is the antiseptic Saturday morning of 1976. There are no guns here. The Skull intends to gently toss the bullet at him. Defeating werewolves is apparently a whole lot easier than I thought.

The most notable thing about this episode is that they’re running out of safe and comedic ways to have fights without making NBC’s Saturday morning censors upset, so Dracula and the villainous Wizard, played by Arthur Malet, have a swordfight with invisible swords. I think the actors were having fun.

What else? Weirdly, they set up this character in the previous episode. Ultra Witch was trying to get the Wizard sprung from prison, which is the sort of “big picture” world-building that these kinds of kids’ programs very rarely ever did. But the previous episode isn’t actually referenced at all this week, which makes you wonder why they bothered.

There’s also a Jonathan Livingston Seagull gag, because this was the seventies, as well as a lot of gags about patriotism, because this was 1976, specifically. The enormous Mickey Morton played one of the Wizard’s henchmen. He’d be back on NBC in two weeks as a big monster in Land of the Lost. Our son thought this was “pretty cool” and we’re glad that somebody did.

In one of the weirdest coincidences since we started this blog, we saw Frank Cady this morning doing a bit part in The Gnome-Mobile and again this evening doing a bit part in this episode. Cady was best known for playing Sam Drucker in more than 300 combined episodes of Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, and The Beverly Hillbillies.

Anyway, five episodes of this show have impressed me so far, and this, sadly, is one of the painful ones. It has Jonathan Harris as the villainous Astrologer, and the most interesting thing about it is that his plan is that very seventies one of starting an earthquake along a bizarrely-misnamed San Andreas Fault. It’s called San Angelica here. This plan would later be adopted by Lex Luthor in the first of Christopher Reeve’s appearances as Superman, and I have a sneaking suspicion a few other seventies superheroes would also foil it before it became too obvious.

The villain of the week is called No Face and he’s played by Sid Haig, who I believe makes the trifecta: he appeared in Batman and Electra Woman and Dyna Girl as well as this show. He plays a dual part, both the villain and, oh dear, Chief Running Nose. Here’s what Haig looked like underneath the weird mask, which is only in that one shot.

Our son adored this one, in part because of one of the all-time goofy fight scenes. Dracula and No Face pick up lances and ride piggyback on their colleagues. He howled with laughter, and I had to agree it was pretty amusing.

Incidentally, the episode was written by Greg Strangis, who also wrote four Electra Woman episodes and a Land of the Lost in the 1976 season. Busy fellow!

After the previous episode of this show, which was a deeply unfunny trainwreck, it’s back to silliness, wit, puns, and in-jokes with “Music Man.” This script, like the first three, is just so much better than it needed to be. It’s easy to overlook the dopey production since the jokes are so good.

The villain this week is played by Marty Allen. He plays a no-talent singer who robs a telethon and his name is, if you’re ready, Lorenzo Musica. There are gags about Rona Barrett, President Buchanan, Rin Tin Tin, and Lassie. Stanley Ralph Ross co-wrote the script with Chuck McCann and Earle Doud, and Ross played the host of a TV telethon to fight natural causes. As in, the leading cause of death is natural causes.

In a double in-joke, in the real world, Ross actually used to don a tuxedo and work the phones at the annual Chabad Telethon. So here’s the second link to Mark Evanier’s site in one week, because as soon as I realized that was Ross playing the comedian begging for money, I remembered this great story about how Ross would take the phones when people called to complain about the telethon. You should check that out.

Our son loved it even if he can’t be expected to get any of the really funny show business in-jokes, and probably doesn’t even know who Rin Tin Tin was. It ends with another deeply ridiculous fight scene which had him guffawing. Marty Allen was a trouper, especially with the costume and makeup people turning him into a horrible version of Roy Wood or Gary Glitter, but I wasn’t surprised that he just barely participated in that part of the story, and allowed himself to be taken out of the action pretty much instantly rather than prolong the embarrassment.

But wait, there’s more!

If you live in the southeast and you enjoy eating, then you definitely need to read our food and travel blog! Check us out at Marie, Let's Eat!

Advertisements

Featured Series

Search for:

Copyright Information

All text on these pages is the copyright of Grant Goggans. Images may be screen captures from episodes that I have created, the Amazon photo of the DVD set, an official promotional photo from the production whose copyright should be noted in the image's properties, or, if sourced from someplace else, credited to the original author. Please contact me for reprint permission. Thank you.